Global Research Assembly

Chicago

July 15, 1979

I find myself bathed in effulgence these days. When you think about the 15 year history of Global Research Assemblies you realize there are people this year who are participating in the GRA for the first time. There are also people who have participated twice, three times, four times, . . . and even 15 times. I tried to imagine myself departing here after two weeks as a participant in this Research Assembly, going back home to a spouse or a friend, and answering the question, "How was it?" I found myself saying it was the best summer ever. And then the question came back, "Why?" I found myself saying things like, "Well, they finally got that building cleaned and it looks great."

"Come on now, why?" . . . . "The food was absolutely out of this world, the decor was just unreal."

"Come on, why was this the best summer?" . . . . "The second floor was tremendous. The focus was really on fellowhood. The second floor looked tremendous; there were flags up and furniture that had just been made."

"Now, what else about the summer? Why was it the best summer ever for you?" . . . . "There was a breakthrough in methods."

"Like what?" . . . . "That interchange event struck me as genius. The way we enabled everyone to be informed about the total work of the summer in a very little time was great."

"What else?" . . . . "The celebrations, from the Musicale to the Masque were fine. I believe the best one was the International Night, when a devout Muslim did an ancient Hindu dance."

"Come on now, not just the celebrations." . . . . "Well, the spins were highly incisive spins on the convergence of the campaigns and breath­takingly alive spins on the Way."

"But, what about this summer makes it really great?" . . . . The question kept coming. Finally I would pull out the task force report documents. "These products are really something, everyone of them. I did not anticipate great things from some of the task forces. Some of the assignments looked conceptually impossible. The programmatic model in Convergence Tools was spelled out two more levels down. It would have taken all of us all of our time a few summers ago. This is the journey of the Fifth City Social Model; that is where this model began."

We have come a long way. Refinement is needed, of course, but this work is staggering. You will want to read carefully the document on the Global Symposium. We could almost publish that report now. It reads in a style of sophistication that is amazing. The report on Foundational Context is a very helpful statement on underlying strategy. I would finally point to these products as evidence of the greatness of this Assembly. The common cover design makes me want to hold on to the set of documents­­they are not throw­aways. One group assigned to a special audit task produced a report called Documentation, and we did not even expect a report from them. The products of this summer are an indication of a new level of quality in our work.

Then the questioning voice would say to me, "Well now, were you not commissioned two weeks ago to have a summer of focus? What was the focus?" . . . . "I don't know," would be my answer. If pushed for an answer, I would say, "Yes, I got focused, but it is inside me. It is not in terms of a battle plan or strategy; it is an interior focus, an interior resolve beyond anything I expected.''

"Well, what is it?" . . . . "I do not know. Maybe it is related to the talks on the Way, maybe that was the focus."

"Yes, but isn't the Way a void?: . . . . "Yes, but I got focus, and I experience this as true."

I experienced receiving some remarkable jewels in relation to our deep underlying life together. We are only in the third year of a four year plan. We will have another plan for 1980­1984. I would suggest that it is possible that the external focus we are grappling with this year may coincide with our new four­year plan. We must take time to carefully determine the implication of what happened in these two weeks. It is like the summer of '71 when we worked on the social process triangles and discovered awe in our midst. We made some discoveries about next year and those discoveries are contained in these documents.

I think we discovered first, that next year the three campaigns will be visible everywhere we are working. It is clearly indicative in our work. The best image of this is three cogwheels that are already going separately have now come together. The gears have started to interlock. As you read these documents you will see that no one campaign could work on its own without intricately meshing with the other two campaigns. Of course, there will be stress in a particular place on one campaign over the other, but it is indicative in our work that all three campaigns will now be going everywhere.

It is also indicative that we have called for a new relationship to society's structures. This came through clearly in your research work. One of the documents has the phrase: the "plura­formation of a global village." I do not know what that means, but intuitively something in me agreed when I read that phrase, the plura­formation of a global village. I do know that as we use the word permeation relative to society's structures w. ~7­:11 need to distinguish carefully between permeation of society and approbation by society.

We are the trans­establishment. We do use jargon, but it is a way to free ourselves from some conventional modes of thinking. We created the word trans­establishment a long time ago. We have said there is the pro­establishment and the dis­establishment, and that we stood ready to embody, create and stand in a third pole­­ the trans­establishment. This takes on new importance for us these days, because it has to do with our fundamental approach to life which is the local. In this time of permeation of society's structures we have, for our whole lifetime of 25 years, understood ourselves to be grounded in the local.

It is not just a development strategy. Rather, the local development strategy flows from the life understanding. The trickle down method of development has failed, and it is only in our time that the local has sensed itself emasculated by the amazing gift of the rapid and technological advances of our time. We stand for the local, the local, the local. Why is that? First, it is because we are interested in what does human community look like in the 21st century. Human community can and will take place only on the local level. This does not deny the existence of regional dynamics, but in terms of human sociality you will not have consciousness without the local, the local, the local. We have the task before us and we have only a little more than 20 years left, the balance of this century, to carve out the indices of human community for the 21st century. Second, it is because of our resolve to care for all 2,000,000 villages­­the four billion people of the world. That means the local, the local, the local. We are getting perhaps, a new sense, a new feel, a new longing, relative to our profound role as catalysis. The question of strategy is a rough one these days. There are so many opportunities that we will have to look very hard at the work of the assembly and make thoughtful decisions. Our job is not to proliferate or expand where we can. We need the underlying strategies that will allow us to see the indices of the human community of the 21st century. What are the new strategies for the three campaigns to allow for that?

You can see in the work of the summer some implications for the long range future, and I would suggest that in all our work on mass impact and mass engagement, the key will be what we have called, the Way. Another word I would like to use for that is transparentization, but the key will be the work on the Way. When we talk about ourselves as catalysis, we mean we are serious about every last one of the four billion people having the opportunity to live his life in the way that we have really lived these last two weeks. We are looking at some new edges. I believe we are rediscovering the edge of the whole arena of the spirit. This summer we have called that the myth factor. In the report documents there are some interesting charts on the myth factor. We have only begun. It is a long journey, but we are on the way. Our work on the myth factor will be intimately related to the 15 per cent and the 85 per cent. To rehearse, that poetry points not only to the 15 per cent and 85 per cent who have not; nor to an East­West boundary. That poetry points to the fact that roughly 15 per cent of us in the civilizing process have had a chance to get our creativity into history and 85 per cent of us have not. This is no simple issue. We have been on a fantastic journey with the 15 and 85 per cent. During the first Human Development Training School in Maliwada we started to see that perhaps we in the 15 per cent did not have to be the source of catalysis for the 85 per cent­­that they were capable of their own catalysis. Now, it is dawning on us that the 85 per cent will be a source of catalysis on the 15 per cent. This relates to the myth factor.

I want to digress a little bit here and reflect on that. The only project that I have worked in is Fifth City. When I came to the Institute I thought it was because I wanted to work in Fifth City. After about three months, I was clear that was not why I was there. However, for the first time I was able to rub shoulders with local man, including the uneducated, poor and illiterate. I was on an interior journey. I discovered that Tom Washington was not only a fine fellow, intelligent and creative, but he acted for me as a guru. I found out many things about life through Tom although he was illiterate. We could never quite convince Tom that men went to the moon; he believed it was all a plot cooked up in Houston. Tom could never get that word Panchayat from the Indian village structure straight. He called it the pawn shop. But Tom stood for me for many years as one I needed to follow. I was educated, and he was not, and I found myself following him. That was a new experience for me. Tom found our contractor when we needed one for the first housing rehabilitation package in Fifth City. It took him three weeks to convince me that this contractor really could do the job. I started to learn that the old man­­not because he was old necessarily­­knew things about life and about people that I had never dreamed. These were happenings not only in Tom's life as he started to care for the world but in my life as well as we rubbed shoulders.

We are interested in changed lives, and in the stories (the myth factor) that point to the inexplicable, unfathomable change in human lives. Our interest, in the first place, is not a full belly or a rich pocket. It is in seeing people who, by society's standards can do nothing, get up and do something. When that happens, you find yourself following in their footsteps. That is how I would talk about rediscovering the edge relative to the myth factor. On the long range of the Way and transparentization, we are rediscovering some old [earnings. We are discovering anew that taking care of ourselves corporately is not just for us, but it has implications for the world. We have but touched the tip of the iceberg of simple methods that can be used in Maharashtra or Manhattan to allow persons not only to care for the world but to experience the irrational, ebullient joy that we have experienced this last two weeks. It is this experience that enables one to see why in the world anyone would go out and commit deliberate self sacrifice.

We come to the Now. I believe we have described how we have had the time of our lives and have experienced a new kind of transunity this last two weeks. That is, fulfillment happened. The prophecy made on opening night about the "They" becoming the "We" has happened to us. I believe we are remembering. We are remembering that globality for us is a state of being. It is not a coagulation of nationalities or urs, different colors of faces, different languages. It is a state of being. When people awaken they realize they can stand in covenantal relationship to all the globe and all of history, even in their own village or community. Last year, I had the experience of visiting each one of our Houses as part of a team. I tell you we experienced the globe as one world. I found myself at home...literally at home...everywhere I went. It was not just that I ran into the blue. It was not that I found myself at home even in the airports of the world, which are very much alike. I mean the at home3ess we experience where we are in the 29 different areas of our grid of the world, or the 30 nations where we are located. We are remembering that globality is a state of being. We are not a series of nations, but we in fact, participate in one citizenship. We are indeed discovering with ourselves what a global society might look like.

Under the category of the Now we are remembering the team. The team is not just a mode of effectivity; it is the structure by which we have, over many years, taken care of ourselves even during times of terrible aridity. We are now entering a time when we can learn once again what it means to take care of one another with the team as the foundation of that care. Because of our engagement, we know what it means to be a team. I find that very exciting.

We have had the time of our lives these two weeks. Why wouldn't we do this for 52 weeks out of the year? I believe each of our Houses is capable of this. On the eighth floor assignment board there are 1,357 names. That is awe inspiring, isn't it? We figure that with 50 more families, we could strengthen every House across the globe to enable the task required. We need to make it clear that people can intern for one year, help with the sash, receive first class training, and then resume their regular living arrangement. he have a lot of training constructs but the best training is in the Houses as that is training of corporate discipline.

We had the time of our lives this year. There was an essay in Time magazine recently. I tell you the essays in many magazines these days are out of this world. Everyone is talking about the future. They are not just saying that life is bad or life is good. They are talking about the future. The latest essay says that the best is yet to come. I believe that is true. This last two weeks we have had the time of our lives and the best is yet to come.